I’m presenting tonight at the Chicago Perl Monger’s meeting. I’m giving a tour of some stuff that might appeal to Perl programmers who want to learn new languages. I’m focusing on Ruby and Python. Here are the notes, they’re also available in my public subversion repository:
Language Hootenanny
Notes for the language hootenanny presentation at February’s Chicago.pm meetings.
Agenda
- A little bit about me
- Find out what everyone wants to know
- Language overview
- for each language, a brief discussion about its culture, philosophy, and resources. Then the one thing about it that’s really “cool” and some code samples.
What I like about a language
Object oriented, good testing framework, great documentation, fun community, lots of libraries, web stuff. Also, interactive shells…the total time it takes to learn a language is cut down considerably if you have an interactive shell to play with. They’re pretty standard anymore, so this is usually just a given.
Classifying languages
There’s really two kinds of languages in my book, the kind you can make money from and the kind you learn for fun.
Ruby
Resources
- Main Ruby site
- Rubyforge, just like Sourceforge but with all Ruby projects
- The Pragmatic Programmer’s Ruby Book (The Pickaxe) by Dave Thomas
- _why’s poignant Ruby guide <—quirky guide to Ruby
- Code Snippets <—actually, this is good for all three languages
My recommendation to learn Ruby is to buy the pickaxe book, and start playing around with it. why’s guide is also good, but it is _pretty quirky, so be prepared. The pickaxe is better if you’re already familiar with object oriented programming and you want to learn Ruby.
One cool thing
Blocks
Python
Resources
- python.org
- Python Tutorial <—the first python tutorial you should read.
- Dive into Python <—the second python tutorial you should read.
The best way to learn Python is to jump into the Python tutorial on the website, then skip around “Dive Into Python.”
One cool thing
List comprehensions.
Perl 6
Resources
PHP?
I haven’t been keeping up with the PHP community enough to really be able to tell you what’s up. I do know that PHP5 is interesting. Discuss amongst yourselves if anyone is interested in PHP.
Other Stuff I Don’t Know (but would like to learn)
Haskell, Lisp
Stuff that other people want to learn, but I’m not so sure about yet.
Erlang, REBOL